Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
I was in Beijing in 2008 for the Olympics. CCP had done massive things to it’s people. Millions had been ordered to relocate from the city to the country to empty the city a bit. Factories shut down for a year in an (unsuccessful) attempt to clean the air.
But the saddest thing was what they did to the Hutongs (sp?). These were the traditional neighborhoods. One story old wooden homes and shops. The Party did not want foreign visitors to see them. So for a while they were tearing them down and putting up high rises. But they ran out of time.
And there were still plenty left, including along the Marathon route. Some of those were outside our hotel. To hide them the Party put up walls with pretty propaganda people. Every 20 yards there’d be a small entrance to the neighborhood. We walked in and shopped there daily.
The shop owners didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Mandarin, but I know they loved to have visitors seeing their shops. They had been expecting to be part of thousands of visitors from everywhere seeing their place, buying shit. Instead their government tried to hide their existence. China doesn’t give a shit about its people. The extreme lockdowns are to spare the Party from embarrassment.
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It's interesting that people seem to be discovering anew that authoritarianism sucks. It sucks in Russia, it sucks in China. Part of the argument of the last few years that the government has been feeding to their people is that the authoritarianism keeps them safe because COVID hit much less there than in the Democratic world. They were arguing Democracy didn't work because it couldn't handle the pandemic.
But COVID don't have any ideology.
